Cloud Computing Rapidly Changing Business Landscape

There’s enough data out there that says cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous as companies start adopting the technology to become agile and future ready. A Gartner report shows that the public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 30.4 percent in 2016 to total $1.26 billion. This shows that cloud computing is fast shaping how the companies are defining business processes and their service delivery paradigm.

As the enterprises are becoming more agile, they are also generating large amount of data that can be utilised to better their performance and experience rapid growth. But to do all this companies n India need to think ahead and plan meticulously to benefit from going onto the cloud and using big data in a meaningful manner.

This was the premise of discussion at the 9th Cloud Computing & Big Data Analytics 2016 Symposium organised by Virtue Insights. One point that came out during the panel discussions was that while faster time-to-market, reduced capital outlay, and the ability to rapidly scale are among the promised benefits of cloud, the companies need to address the complexities of the new IT management set up to get the benefit.

“As cloud continues to shape the technology landscape and service delivery paradigm, companies need to re-evaluate all aspects of their service delivery model—from processes, controls and tools to governance, skills and culture,” said Lux Rao, Country Leader – Future Cities & CTO – Technology Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who was chairing the event. This meant that companies need to get more innovative with all these aspects as they adopt cloud computing.

“Reliability in business is the most important thing. To be able o become that the backend needs to be completely scalable. All these have to be managed in the cloud as you grow to become the next generation business,” added Ravindra Verna, Director India, Verndale Technology.

The other aspect of becoming a smart business is how well the company is able to leverage upon the data that is generated due to better business processes and data capture methods. Big Data expert Pronam Chatterjee, Founder & CEO of BluePie Consulting defined Big Data as the main lever that is pushing the economy. It is at work every time an airline allocates the passenger a seat, how products are stocked by the local supermarket. “App is the business now, which makes every business house a software business.” Big data has four aspects today volume which means the scale of data we get today, then there is variety of data, velocity of analysis of this data, and veracity which determines the authenticity of the data, explained Chatterjee. Once these four aspects are taken into account, then can the companies make sound business decisions.

Emphasising this fact, Ravi Vijayaraghavan, Vice President and Head – Analytics, Flipkart explained how the company has built a highly scalable data infrastructure. It is a rich source of information that gives the teams insights about Flipkart’s consumers, sellers and the supply chain. “The analytics teams leverage this infrastructure to build a deep understanding of our business, its growth drivers and the Indian consumer,” he added. Based on those insights the company then creates almost real time solutions to drive business growth and improve user experience for its consumers and sellers.